It's Friday, my migraine is slowly calming down, and the kind and talented folks over at The Wicked Library have opted to read three of my pieces on this week's episode: "Corpus Delectable", "Lust for Life", and "Transference". It's a nice blend of varied length fiction: drabble (100 words), flash (500 words), and short (2,100 words).

It's always cool to hear someone talk about your work--especially when they are as kind as Nelson was here--but it's also slightly surreal when it comes with "a wee bit of a warning", the host says he "expects lots of nasty email" over it, and that yeah, "it's really, really that disturbing".

Wow, really? I guess I've arrived.

No, I'm just kidding. I don't make it a point to disturb people. Well, not in my writing, anyway.

But seriously, I don't write a great deal of "squirm" horror. "Corpus Delectable" and "Lust for Life" were actually two of the very first horror stories I ever wrote, and they are among the few zombie tales in my portfolio. Check them out if you can--Nelson Pyles has a great reading voice. He's also super cool human being--as is Maddie Holliday Von Stark, who created some equally disturbing artwork for the episode. You can also have some fun skiing down my resume, apparently.

Here's some phenomenal artwork done for "Lust for Life" by artist Jeff Swenson. You can find him at the following link--he is extraordinarily talented: http://swensonfunnies.com.

As far as "Transference" goes, I have some news I've been dying to share with you guys related to that, but we're not quite there yet. It's exciting, though . . . like, really exciting. Besides being in Michael Bailey's THE LIBRARY OF THE DEADanthology, which is being published later this year by Written Backwards, this was one of my prouder moments. It's what I was referring to when I posted this back in May:

I've had a lot of those moments, to be honest. Let's face it--I've been lucky. No matter what, it's been a good year. I've had a lot of lousy moments, too, obviously. The pendulum is still swinging. But it always will.

Well, until it stops.

But anyway, back to "Transference". I will tell you that it was originally published on Hellnotes and was later fleshed out into a 3,700 word short story (thanks to my long lost friend Ann K. Boyer) which will soon appear in BUGS: TALES THAT SLITHER, CREEP AND CRAWL, an anthology coming soon from Great Old Ones Publishing. The foreword is written by director Simon Rumley, known for his traumatic segment "P is for Pressure" in THE ABCs OF DEATH as well as CLUB LE MONDE, LITTLE DEATHS, THE LIVING AND THE DEAD, and RED WHITE & BLUE, among others.

And yeah, okay. It's that disturbing. I've had people stop talking to me over the full version of that story. I had a bit of a panic attack after submitting it to a publisher who just had a baby. But this is horror, right?

In PRIME EVIL, Douglas E. Winter said that "Great horror fiction is not about shock, but emotion; it digs beneath our skin and stays with us. It is proof that an image is only as powerful as its context."

I found Charles' desperation to be the most horrifying element to "Lust for Life". His inability to have more children, the tragedy and hopelessness of it all. The situation was just so awful all the way around. And his poor wife . . . she really just had no choice but to be the sacrifice here.

If you read the longer tale "Transference" belongs to, I hope you'll agree that "Baby's Breath" goes past the point of no return and ventures into territory where yeah, it's unpleasant, it's ugly, and it's certainly shocking--but to me, it's actually the emotion which drives the character to do what she does that's more horrifying than the deed itself.

More news soon. You can decide for yourself if you pick it up. Check out the cover by MJ Preston.

So if you're up for a good squirm session, click the following link to The Wicked Library Episode 503. Then throw on some ear buds and get comfortable.

Author & Editor

﻿Sydney Leigh is the evil literary double of a mostly sane writer, editor, photographer, artist, English teacher, and native of the North Shore. Her poetry, short fiction, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications.

Her best friend is a Border Collie, and despite holding degrees in English, Psychology, and Graphic Design, she spends most of her free time doing her teenage son’s laundry and playing rock-paper-scissors with her imaginary roommate, Ted.